Literary Events & Competitions

Summer 2025 Events

Inaugural Keynote Lecture
July 12, 7:00pm
Blue Ridge Room, UNCA Highsmith Student Union

Join us for our inaugural Keynote Lecture, featuring Katherine Scott Crawford. Crawford will read from her new novel, The Miniaturist’s Assistant, and will be joined onstage by New York Times bestselling novelist Elizabeth Kostova for a conversation about the book and the writer’s life.

Katherine Scott Crawford is the award-winning author of The Miniaturist’s Assistant and Keowee Valley. A former backpacking guide, adjunct professor, and recovering academic, her newspaper column appeared weekly across the country and abroad, including in USA Today, The Detroit Free Press, the Herald Scotland, and more. Winner of a North Carolina Arts Award in fiction, she holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’d rather be in the woods with her dog than anywhere else, enjoys curious people, adventure, and snow—and believes historical fiction the best way to time travel. An eleventh-generation Southerner, she directs writing retreats at a remote mountain lodge in Western North Carolina, where she lives with her family.

Elizabeth Kostova is the author of three novels. Her first, The Historian (Little, Brown, 2005), was the first novel in American publishing history to debut at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, won numerous awards, has been translated into 40 languages, and is being made into a television mini-series. Her most recent novel is The Shadow Land (Random House, April 2017). She is co-founder of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, which provides competitive opportunities for Bulgarian writers and translators, as well as opportunities for native-English writers to travel to Bulgaria. Kostova lives with her family in Asheville, North Carolina.